Our Antibiotics Are Becoming Useless – Fast

By 2050, 10 million people could die each year from diseases that have grown resistant to drugs.

By Sigal Samuel May 7, 2019

Vox – “Common diseases are becoming untreatable.” That’s the blunt warning issued on page one of a major new United Nations report on drug resistance.

If we don’t make a radical change now, the report says, drug-resistant diseases could kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

Drug resistance is what happens when we overuse antibiotics in the treatment of humans, animals, and plants. When a new antibiotic is introduced, it can have great, even life-saving results — for a while.

But then the bacteria adapt. Gradually, the antibiotic becomes less effective, and we’re left with a disease that we don’t know how to treat.

Common problems like STDs and urinary tract infections are also becoming resistant to treatment. Routine hospital procedures like C-sections could become more dangerous as well as the risk associated with infection increases.

Amy Mathers, who directs the University of Virginia’s Sink Lab, told me that over the past decade there’s been a surge of US patients infected with bacteria for which there’s no effective antibiotic. “I see that once a month,” she said. “Ten years ago, that was a rarity.”

Experts like Mathers are increasingly warning that drug-resistant superbugs pose a huge threat to our health.

Now, the UN report adds that drug resistance could also severely mess up our economy.

The good news is this problem can be solved really cheaply. If each person in high- and middle-income countries invested $2 a year in this cause, we could research new drugs and implement effective measures to reduce the threat of resistance, the report says. Read more.

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